Breakfast with the Prude

One reason I don’t have a cooking blog is because I can’t really cook.
Another is that I am too lazy to type out recipes, and downright indolent when it comes to taking step-by-step photos of my cooking processes.

But yesterday my husband asked me to make Amish Baked Oatmeal for breakfast.
It made him so happy that I wanted to share the joy. (The sloth is rearing its ugly head again: I may have already posted this recipe but it is too much trouble to go back and check.)

Here is the family cookbook. 

Please note my turkey salt and pepper shakers in the background

I love my family cookbooks.

Here is the recipe.

I love this recipe. Can you tell? 
(On a side note, my mother-in-law’s cookbooks never have spots. She is not lazy. She keeps her cookbook separated from her messy work surface by several feet and trots back and forth. Sometimes it is almost too much trouble for me to move the bowl from off the recipe to check it.)

Here is the oatmeal. I put the little cream pitcher in the photo for picturesque effect and then realized you can tell it is empty. Just pretend I already poured the milk into the bowl.

You will like this. Really. Two caveats: It doesn’t really feed 4, unless two of you are oat-phobic. And make sure your milk is hot when you pour it on the oatmeal.
I also made molasses cookies yesterday.
AND Creamy Bratwurst Stew. But before I could get a photo my husband
polished it off.

Maybe I’ll share those recipes another day.
For now it’s best to keep your expectations low.
If I start over-achieving, you’ll start expecting spot-free recipes.
Where will it end?
I’ll tell you where: step-by-step photos.

When Life Gives you Sour Grapes

Sour Grape Salad at the 2:00 position on the plate

I was asked if my Super Bowl post yesterday could have a tinge of sour grapes.

Well, naturally!

And that got me to thinking.

What about those of us who refuse to enjoy Super Bowl Sunday with the bean dip, barbeque and beer  being prepared in massive quantities on the east coast?

We have to eat, but we absolutely refuse to partake in any Super Bowlish dishes.

So, all you glum folks whose football teams will not be in Indianapolis this coming Sunday–do I have a recipe for you!  It comes via my daughter-in-law’s mother, who made it for wedding rehearsal dinner. We had to forcibly remove the wedding party from the salad so we could get on with the show.

Sour Grapes Salad

8 oz. cream cheese

small tub Cool Whip

½ c. sugar

1 lb. seedless red or green grapes

Wash and dry grapes. Combine cream cheese, Cool Whip and sugar till smooth and lovely.

Fold in grapes and refrigerate.

There you have it. A little something to sweeten Sunday.

You may want to hang onto this one even if your teams are playing Sunday.

If your team loses it will sweeten Monday.

Recipe Perplexity Disorder

It’s Global Village Monday! Let’s visit Kitchens Around the World and observe a universal social phenomenon The Prude likes to call

Recipe Perplexity Disorder.

There, in an igloo hovering in the Arctic Circle, an Inuit woman peers at her cookbook.

She calls her neighbor over in frustration.

“How round is a rounded cupful of whale blubber?’ she asks.

In Scotland the sheepherder’s wife puzzles over a recipe.

“Exactly how much,” she muses, ‘is a handful of haggis? My size hand? Or my husband’s?”

A Greek woman, frantically trying to get dinner on the table before her sons and husband come back from a hard day of rioting in the streets, has no clue what a ‘medium-sized’ eggplant for her Moussaka would be. Medium compared to every eggplant in the world? Or just the ones in her kitchen?

A newlywed in Venice, looking through recipes as she rides the gondola to the market, wonders why Grandmother Giovanna tells her to add red wine ‘to taste’ for the Pasta Bolognese. Whose taste? Hers? Granny Giovanna’s? The gondolier’s?

In Nigeria, a teenage girl wants to cook dinner for her parent’s anniversary. Everything is going fine until she realizes with horror that she has to cook the yams ‘till firm/tender’. She blinks. Can that be right? IS there such a texture as firm/tender? She opts for frozen pizza instead.

Our tour ends with The Prude flipping desperately through recipes and wondering why Church Cookbook Ladies refuse to specify what size Jello or cream cheese box to use.

We timorous–nay–lousy cooks of the world ask only that those sharing their favorite recipe acknowledge that measurement ambiguity is our worst enemy.

Does anyone know how much a ‘dessert spoon of cornstarch’ would be?

The hundreds of cookbooks and cooking magazines that daily confuse The Prude